


Time's Winged Chariot

by Reading Redhead (readingredhead)



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-14
Updated: 2011-08-14
Packaged: 2017-10-22 15:04:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/239334
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/readingredhead/pseuds/Reading%20Redhead
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He sounds tired, and sad in the smallest rooms of his hearts. She wonders what it would be like if he could delete them (like she has done -- will do -- is doing) to propel himself forward.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Time's Winged Chariot

**Author's Note:**

> For alexandria_skye over on LJ. The title is borrowed from "To His Coy Mistress" by Andrew Marvell.

She knows something's wrong when the doors open and he walks in all alone. He shambles over to the controls, half-heartedly toggles a few levers and pushes a button (one that doesn't do anything -- yet), but his hearts aren't in it.

"It's just you and me again, old girl," he says, his voice echoing in the unnatural silence of the control room. He sounds tired, and sad in the smallest rooms of his hearts. She wonders what it would be like if he could delete them (like she has done -- will do -- is doing) to propel himself forward. It seems like an excellent plan, until she remembers the way it feels to have lost everything but the sense that something has been lost, and she wouldn't wish that on anyone. Especially not on her thief, who loses enough already. (Who might have lost -- might still lose -- her, except she'd never let that happen).

She's the last of the TARDISes -- has been, will be -- so she can say with some certainty that time works differently for her than for anyone else. For her, everything is always now -- or then -- or also yet to come -- and she doesn't have to bother with pesky tenses for talking about when she's where, because she's _every_ when. Before the encounter with House, before having been _alive_ , she didn't quite understand what it would mean, to be stuck in a body inside a timeline moving always in one direction, but now that she knows it, she's full of more wonder and sorrow than ever before that her beautiful thief, who loses so much, can bear it. He moves through events as he pleases, but the line of his own life, his own memory, his own being stretches inexorably on. He lives in time, and time's arrow always points forward.

So when he kicks at the central console, and growls with rage -- when he stalks off down the staircase, pulls out his screwdriver, and curses in Old High Gallifreyan when his wristwatch snags against lapel -- when he drops into his makeshift seat in the space below, full of dangling wires and the bits that get left out when he takes her apart and puts her back together again -- she knows that it's because he's hurting, because he _misses_ the latest of his cast of strays, and because he doesn't know when he'll see this one again, or what will come of them.

But _she_ knows everything that happens up to (and sometimes beyond) her threshold. It's not even an issue of memory, not that silly sequential system that the fully alive must rely upon to bring back the things they lose, and this is what she gains from being not-quite-living, because no one and nothing is ever _always_ gone. So while the thief works below, she remembers in her own way, letting her mind wander through rooms and times in search of this one stray who's wormed her way into his hearts like none of the others.


End file.
